Wednesday, August 29, 2007

CNN's Religion Series Labeled As Offensive

I have to admit I did not catch any of these shows. But I have read enough reports and heard a lot of it from different news outlets to know the meat of it. I can't say that I am surprised by this:

In response to uproar from angry viewers and a media watchdog report, CNN advertisers have distanced themselves from a special series that aired last week entitled "God's Warriors," produced and anchored by the network's chiefinternational correspondent, Christiane Amanpour.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America called an episode of the series that focused on Judaism "one of the most grossly distorted programs" ever aired on mainstream American television. ...The first part of "God's Jewish Warriors" compared Jewish and Christian "radicals" to Muslim supporters of suicide terror, presented anti-Israel commentators with no counterbalance, falsely labeled the West Bank as Palestinian land and minimized Jewish rights to the Temple Mount – Judaism'sholiest site, the critics said. During last week's program, Amanpour also conducted a friendly interview about Israel with former President Jimmy Carter, whose most recent book, "Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid," criticized the Jewish state's treatment of Palestinians. The book was slammed for a series of falsehoods and was widely labeled anti-Israeli by a number of media critics.

The CAMERA said the CNN series is "false in its basic premise, established in the opening scene in which Jewish (and Christian) religious fervency is equated with that of Muslims heard endorsing 'martyrdom,' or suicide-murder. There is, of course, no counterpart among Jews and Christians to the violent jihadist Muslim campaigns under way across the globe."

Comparing Jewish and Christian radicals to Muslim extremists is insane.

Sure there are some pretty crazy Jews and Christians out there. Sure some have resorted to violence to get there point across. The thing that really separates them is the fact that Jewish and Christian beliefs are not founded on the grounds that they are obligated to kill anyone who does not worship as they do.